


Soft You Tread Above Me

by josiepug



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Claustrophobia, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Panic Attacks, Pre-Canon, Psychological Horror, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Vomiting, Whump, World War I, guys it's a war, i'm serious on the claustrophobia warning tho, it's generally not great
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22826743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiepug/pseuds/josiepug
Summary: It's 1916, and Sergeant Major Tommy Shelby is used to crawling down a dark hole with a dozen other men and laying bombs. It's business as usual.Until it isn't.
Relationships: Tommy Shelby & Freddie Thorne
Comments: 26
Kudos: 70





	1. Digging

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe no one has done this one yet. It's tunnel collapse time!
> 
> Seriously though, if you're claustrophobic, I would be careful around this fic. I'm not, and I still freaked myself out a little bit. Also, while I did a completely unreasonable amount of research for a piece of fanfiction, I'm sure there are still errors. Sorry. This takes place nominally during The Somme and is an amalgamation of show canon and several different WW1 events that have been all smushed together for my whumpy purposes. 
> 
> If you're wondering what a geophone is, it's [this](https://images.app.goo.gl/unQUP6MMfnDAhiEJA).
> 
> The fic is basically complete, though I'm still tinkering with the other two chapters. The next one should be up in a few days. Hope you like it!

Tommy could hear the shovels.

The question was where exactly they were coming from. He shifted the left bell of his geophone over half an inch and held his breath. The shovels were louder in his right ear, though only slightly. He adjusted again. 

There. Tommy held his candle over the compass and felt his stomach turn over. He moved a precautionary hand over his mouth and closed his eyes once more. He had to be sure. If he was wrong, it could easily mean all of their lives.

He slowed his breathing, forcing the thin air to be enough, every fibre of his being concentrated on the cold metal in his ears.

Yes, there it was again. _Thunk. Thunk. Thunk._

Slightly above them, but headed in this direction. Getting closer all the time. _Thunk. Thunk. Thunk._

Silently, Tommy took out the notebook and jotted down his compass readings. The candle flickered ominously. He couldn’t tell if he was lightheaded from hours of concentration or lack of oxygen, but it was time to go. Tommy swallowed hard, glad that he never ate before a shift at the listening post. He stowed the notebook in his pack and crawled back up the low tunnel.

When Tommy reached the place where his tunnel rejoined the main artery, he had to stop for a moment, blinking hard against the profusion of lanterns. The listening post had a way of becoming the whole world, and it was always a shock not to have to strain to hear sounds. Tommy’s men were going about their business at various points along to the active tunnel, either digging deeper, fortifying the new sections, or resting. Tommy straightened and brushed off his uniform before any of them could catch sight of him. There was no time to waste.

“How’s it sound out there, Sergeant Major?” Danny was the closest man to the tunnel, and he grinned up at Tommy with a nail firmly held between his teeth. 

“Like the Germans have the map of the place, Private Owens.” His own voice thundered against his ears even though he was whispering.

“Just our luck, sir.” Danny shook his head. If someone had told Tommy ten years ago that he’d be surrounded by men who’d call him sir, he’d have laughed in their face. Then again, if someone had told him he’d be forty feet underground he’d have stolen a horse and ridden far away from Small Heath.

_It’s not natural,_ Arthur had told him on leave in The Garrison. _War isn’t natural,_ Tommy had replied. He’d meant it then, but that had been way back in 1915. Now he wondered whether he was wrong, and if in fact war was the most natural thing there was. The pure base of human experience, to which every hope eventually fell.

As soon as Danny turned back to his work, Tommy took the opportunity to rub his eyes. It was getting worse. He saw things in the dark now, sometimes. Heard voices. The chalk walls whispering, calling him. Tommy shook his head harshly. The men would be relieved to return to the surface in a few hours. It would be another section’s job to reach the designated spot and set the charge. Eight days since Tommy had seen the sun. Forty-one days since this battle started. Part of Tommy thought that it wouldn’t end until every man was dead, on both sides. The chalk down here was hungry.

“Private Smith,” Tommy called quietly to the gangly young man feeding the canaries.

“Yes, Sergeant Major?” Smitty towered over Tommy, but he couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Ada’s age. Smitty’s father had been brought in at the start of the war, an experienced miner from Durham, but he’d died under Ypres and Smitty himself had signed up to take his place. Looking for vengeance, he said. How he was going to get his revenge against the earth itself was anyone’s guess. Tommy hadn’t asked.

“Deliver this message to Lieutenant Scofield.” 

“Yessir,” Smitty said. Tommy handed the boy his readings on the German position, and Smitty tore off as if the fate of British army rested on his slim shoulders. Tommy leaned against the wall. 

He would have to send more money to Polly this week. She was cagey in her letters, but Tommy could tell they were being rationed nearly as badly as the men on the front. Last week, Polly had said that Ada had been writing letters to a soldier, but she burned them before Polly could find out who it was. As much as Tommy wanted this eternal war to be over, he didn’t envy Polly or Ada. They spent all day trying to stay alive and all night writing to dead men. At least here, you heard the shells coming. 

Tommy made his way to the head of the active tunnel. He had to do something. Two sappers, Hinckley and Braddock, were hard at work, chiselling silently with the ends of their bayonets. Tommy slung off his own weapon and joined them. They nodded acknowledgment, but said nothing. This deep, silence was paramount. It was why they used bayonets rather than picks, even though the going was much slower. 

Soon, Tommy lost himself in the methodical work. He knew his men probably thought he did this to prove some kind of point about solidarity. Certainly, they knew he wasn’t much of a sapper. With the exception of Freddie, every man in his section was a hardened coal miner. It had taken them a while to warm to the slight gypsy horse trainer who was sent down to lead them. Now, they trusted him. It should’ve made things easier.

Time slipped by along with the mindless chiselling. It seemed to be only a few minutes before Smitty was back, holding out a note. Time tended to be strange down here, in the dark.

Tommy set down his bayonet and pushed his way to his feet. His vision swam slightly as he stood, and he rested one hand briefly against the tunnel wall. Sleep was hard to figure here, but whichever way you counted, Tommy knew he hadn’t been getting nearly enough. It didn’t help that his stomach revolted unpredictably and he had to time the attempts at food so that he could sneak away down the listening tunnel if necessary. Hard to get privacy down here, and harder to keep discipline when the Sergeant Major was sicking up hardtack every day or so.

Tommy took the note from Smitty and held up a lantern. He read quickly, then folded it neatly and tucked it in his coat pocket. He gestured for Smitty to move and both of them made their way back to the main tunnel. Tommy sensed the way Smitty watched him, looking for clues as to what news the note held. Tommy kept his face still despite the creeping sensation in his stomach. 

They passed the two Stevens brothers having some kind of silent argument over one of the beams, as well as Snopes and Hinchford, working diligently. McEwan pretended to be busy when he saw Tommy coming. Further up the tunnel, Collins was using his rest time to read haltingly through his Bible. His lips moved as he sounded the words out. Tommy swallowed the lump in his throat and felt for the note in his breast pocket.

_Remain below until charges are laid. Any means necessary. Lt. Scof_

It was a simple message, particularly for the man who wrote it, who had never so much as set foot in the tunnels. What difference did a few extra hours make?

“So did our Lords and saviours just tell you to blow us all up or what?” Freddie Thorne asked, leaning against the post he had been wedging into the wall.

There were many good things about fighting alongside a man you had known since childhood. One of the bad ones was that, even in poor light, he had a better idea what you were thinking than anyone else. Even worse when that friend was Freddie Thorne, who had never been known to keep a thought to himself and had so little respect for authority that it was somewhat of a shock that he hadn’t already been put in front of a firing squad. Lack of fresh recruits, Tommy suspected.

“We’ll be down here a little while longer is all. Section F is needed elsewhere,” Tommy said. He would need to return to the listening post before he could tell his men what they were going to do. There was too much at stake not to be certain. Tommy started to turn away, but Freddie grabbed his arm. Tommy held perfectly still in his grip.

“You can’t spend every minute down there, Tommy. You’ll go mad. Just spit out the bad news and we’ll deal with it. We all know there’s not a fucking thing you can do about your orders.”

There were plenty of ways to go mad down here, and Tommy had already chosen his poison. He extricated his arm.

“Is that how you address a superior officer, Corporal?” He had only moved a couple of inches out of Freddie’s reach, but that was enough.

“No, sir,” Freddie answered coldly. Tommy didn’t understand how he could still cling onto things so childishly. There was no space down here for history. Tommy turned away. 

He made his way back along the ranks and his eyes couldn’t help but be drawn drawn to the blackness that branched away from the working tunnel. The sooner he went down, the sooner they’d be able to put the plan into motion.

Tommy ducked out of the lantern light and into the long, dark tunnel.

The listening tunnel was small, meant for only one man, and soon Tommy was crawling. The air was noticeably harder to breathe, forcing him to focus on keeping his breaths light and quiet. There was no light except for the flickering candle, guttering in so little oxygen.

It didn’t take more than five minutes to get to the end of the tunnel, but he couldn’t bring his watch down here and it might well have been forever. Finally, he curled up next to the rough chalk wall.

He could feel the shovels.

_Thunk. Thunk. Thunk._

Much closer than they’d been before. Heart in his throat, Tommy assembled the geophone. His suspicions weren’t enough; he needed an accurate reading. The shovels were close enough that there was no mistaking them, even over the unprofessional thundering of his heart. 

_Thunk. Thunk. Thunk._

 _By any means necessary._ Tommy swallowed hard, pressing himself back against the tunnel wall. The shovel strikes pounded irregularly into his back.

The sensation brought on a memory. Of crouching in the trench, back to the wall, as gunfire rained down overhead. It had been a little under a year into the war, and Tommy’s Sergeant Major at the time, Jost, had turned to him, seemingly out of the blue. _I’ve never met a man so good at war as you, Shelby. You’re bloody terrifying out there,_ he had said. Tommy could barely hear him over the sounds of the battle, but he knew what he meant. It didn’t have to do with the killing, or at least not only that. The army didn’t tell you that war wasn’t mostly about fighting, though Tommy could hold his own when necessary. 

No. The real art of war was sitting very still and listening. And not moving until the enemy had committed fully, until the last possible second, when you could feel his breath on your neck. And then it was the killing.

Tommy knew what he had to do. It was obvious. A gamble to make even his father nervous.

When Tommy emerged from the listening tunnel, he spoke to the men at regular volume. Every one of them jumped, but Tommy didn’t pause. 

“There’s been a change of plan. We’re going to be the team to lay this charge, and we don’t get out of this tunnel until it’s done. The Germans are getting close, so it’s a flat out race now. We move to picks and prioritise speed over silence.” He paused, for effect. “So, what do you say, can you beat Jerry to lay these charges?” The passion in Tommy’s voice must belong to some other man. Out of the corner of his eye, Tommy saw one of the supports shudder and quickly glanced away.

A soft chorus of ‘ayes’ and ‘yes, Sergeant Majors’ followed this little speech. Tommy shook his head. It would take more than that to see these men through.

“Come on now. We want the Germans to hear us now, right? Give them a bit of a fright. So I’ll ask again, can you beat them to it?”

This time the chorus was much louder. Tommy’s nausea, at least, was gone, replaced by a cold, hard emptiness and a creeping sense of foreboding.

In no time at all, the air was filled with the rhythmic whacking of picks against the unyielding chalk. Tommy took up a spot with his men, hacking away and trying not to think. He closed his eyes briefly, imagining that the pick rubbing his hands raw was a hoe. Just mucking out the horses. Hard, honest work. How his father would laugh at him. _And you signed up for this. Did I teach you nothing, boy? There are two types of men in this world. The ones who run the cons and the ones who get taken in. And the best con artists of all are the ones who make you believe that there’s such a thing as honest work._

Tommy hacked away for an hour before letting the second wave of men take over. The mood in the tunnel was practically cheerful. McEwan started singing ‘Awa, Whigs, Awa’ until Braddock managed to decode some of the words, cuffed him around the head, and started in on a song that was less Scottish. His deep voice bounced disorientingly off of the walls.

_Out of the dirk and darkness, I was born  
Go down  
Out of the hard black coal face I was torn  
Go down  
Kicked on the world and the earth split open  
Crawled through a crack where the rung was broken  
Burrow the hole away in the cold  
Go down_

The rest of the men soon joined in, forming a somewhat more tuneful choir than might be expected. The old mining song rang through the chalk, reminding Tommy that many of these men’s lives had changed little since the war began. Underneath the ground, France wasn’t so different from England, and the earth wanted to kill you wherever you went. 

Tommy’s instincts were telling him that this time the earth would succeed, but he couldn’t trust his instincts down here. Death stalked them too closely. And the others clearly didn’t feel it, or else they were just glad to be able to raise their voices. 

“Sir, forgive my asking, but why do we want the Germans to hear us all of a sudden?” Smitty was at Tommy’s shoulder. He had probably been there some time, working up the courage to speak. 

Tommy decided on the truth. “Because it doesn’t matter.”

Smitty didn’t understand. Tommy took pity on him because it was clear that the boy wasn’t going to be able to work up the courage to ask. “We’re too close to each other. The first one of us to trigger our bomb will set the other one off too. As long as we hear their shovels, they’re still down here, and not likely to want to blow up their own men.”

“And if the shovels stop?”

“They won’t. Not before we get where we’re going.” Smitty nodded, but he wasn’t an idiot. For a moment, he and Tommy looked at each other, and knew.

Any means necessary.

Tommy wasn’t going to return to the listening post because it wouldn’t matter and he didn’t want to hear the silence. They were down here until the end, one way or the other. Tommy should have taken off on a stolen horse while he still had the chance. But he hadn’t, and now here he was, waiting for the Germans to blink.

_Thunk. Thunk. Thunk._

The hours ticked by, the moment of reckoning coming closer and closer. Freddie kept trying to talk to Tommy, and Tommy kept brushing him off. He knew it was cowardice. He didn’t trust himself to face his old friend and still be able stay down here in the darkness where the earth called for him.

While the mood had been jolly to start with, slowly the men grew tired and quiet. They would have been back above by now, if Scofield hadn’t changed the plan. And who knew what had happened to Section F anyway. Had there been a skirmish? The war raged above, but it had little bearing on them. Only the German shovels, which Tommy was trying not to strain to hear. 

The moment Tommy’s measurements told him that they were within range, he called a halt. When the men stopped digging, the tunnel got unnervingly quiet. He couldn’t hear the shovels. Bile was rising in Tommy’s throat and the sense of _wrong_ was so strong that he thought he might drown in it. 

“Private Owens will be setting the charge. Everyone else, return to the surface. Quickly. You know the drill.” Tommy stood over Danny as he worked, one eye on the rest of his men. They gathered up their equipment with practiced speed. Tommy felt a small measure of relief as they jogged away. No matter how experienced the miner, no man wanted to spend longer down here than was absolutely necessary. 

Well, there was one man.

“Freddie, get out of here,” Tommy said when he saw Freddie lingering, fiddling with his pack.

“Someone needs to make sure Owens doesn’t fuck this up,” Freddie said drily. Tommy was going to kill him one of these days. Every nerve in his body was on fire, and all he could hear was the silence where there should have been shovels. Who knew how much time they had? And here Freddie was, apparently incapable of understanding that it was Tommy’s responsibility that all of his men got out of here. 

“Corporal Thorne, that wasn’t a fucking suggestion,” Tommy spat. They stared at each other for a moment. Then Freddie turned up the tunnel, looking over his shoulder to

The world exploded.


	2. Dying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is more of a coda, so this is the main event. Again, major claustrophobia, some gore, and a lot of blind digging. Hope you enjoy it!

Very far away, there was a voice.

“Sir. Sergeant Major, sir. Can you hear me?” Someone was talking. Tommy strained to hear what they were saying but there was a high ringing sound and his head was splitting open and who were they even talking to? It should feel important but…

“Sergeant Major.” Something rocked Tommy’s shoulder. His shoulder hurt. Actually, everything hurt, which was strange because he couldn’t really feel much and how did something hurt if he couldn’t feel it? But it did. It hurt more and more with each movement. He wished he could make it stop but he didn’t know how. Maybe the person talking—

“Oh God, sir, please. Tommy, please.” Danny. Danny was the person talking. To Tommy. To him.

Tommy opened his eyes. Or at least, he tried to. He couldn’t tell if it worked or not. He couldn’t see anything. The darkness was total. And the air was thin. And…

Fuck.

Abruptly, the air got even thinner as Tommy’s breathing ratcheted up, fighting against the lack of air. There had been an explosion. There had been an explosion and the tunnel had collapsed and now they were trapped underground. He remembered now. The German bomb must have gone off, which meant—

Wait.

“Danny,” Tommy’s throat was full of dust, making his voice barely audible. He felt the weight against his side slump.

“Thank The Lord. Fuck. For a moment there, sir…One of the beams hit you in the head. I think there’s blood. Or—It’s wet, but it could be mud. I can’t tell.” Danny was rambling, the words coming high and fast.

“Danny,” Tommy managed again, his throbbing skull making it difficult to parse Danny’s jumbled thoughts. “Why aren’t we dead?” They should be dead. Danny had set the charge. If the bomb had gone off, they would have been blown into smithereens. Not even a body for Aunt Polly to bury.

Tommy managed to roll his head over to the side just in time as bile came pouring up his throat. His head protested vehemently at the movement, and he missed Danny’s next few words. 

“…for some reason. I don’t know what went wrong, if I laid it wrong or what, but it didn’t blow.”

So it was here with them. In this tunnel that had less and less air by the second, there was also a bomb. A bomb that should have already blown but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t and would they even know before the particles of their bodies were torn apart and—

“Sir,” Danny sounded even more panicked than before. Tommy’s chest ached, but he forced himself to breathe more slowly. They weren’t dead yet.

“We need to move. There isn’t enough air. And we should put distance between ourselves and the bomb,” Tommy said, only a little breathless. There. Simple, short thoughts. Items that were doable. There was no point in thinking about the tons of dirt pressing down on them, held at bay by thin wooden beams that were already half blown up. No point at all.

“Right. Okay,” Danny said, audibly bringing himself under control as well. Something brushed against Tommy’s shoulder and he flinched before realising that it was one of Danny’s hands. He grasped it, pulling himself into a sitting position. Immediately, the world tipped, and Tommy instinctively closed his eyes, which did exactly nothing to help. He held himself very still, waiting for his brain to catch up with his body, lips clamped tight against the returning nausea.

Someone moaned.

Tommy had his wrist knife in his hand before he quite knew what he was doing. “Who’s there?” He whispered, and hoped it was his still rocky hearing that made his voice sound so cracked.

“Why aren’t we dead?” came Freddie’s voice out of the darkness. Tommy let go of the breath he’d been holding and then immediately had to brace against the floor as his balance went again. 

“Bomb was faulty,” Tommy answered, forcing himself to stop imagining it sitting there, feet away. Would it go off if someone touched it? What had gone wrong? “Tunnel is blocked and we’re running out of air, so we need to move. Any injuries?” He should have asked Danny already, he realised belatedly, but his head was killing him and it didn’t really matter did it. 

Freddie groaned. “Fucking shoulder. Again. There’s something in there. Wood, maybe. Least it’s not a fucking bullet this time.” The bullet meant for Tommy. That was twice now that he’d been inexplicably spared, and it might have got Tommy believing in God again if it weren’t for the fact that several tons of earth could fall on their heads at any moment.

“How deep?” Meaning, of course, would Freddie bleed out if they pulled the thing out. 

“Not too bad. I think I can—-ahhhh!” There was an unpleasant squelching sound and Freddie’s voice devolved into panting. Tommy couldn’t help but imagine the air being sucked out of their little haven with every heavy breath. They needed to move. 

_Thump._

Tommy covered his head instinctively as the ground jolted. For a few moments, everything jittered. So much for God.

The movement stopped, as suddenly as it had started, and whichever beams had withstood the first blast were still there. Somehow. Tommy was half-glad he couldn’t see what kind of shape they were in.

“Bloody hell,” Freddie whispered. All three of them must be staring at that invisible ceiling. All it would take was one unlucky hit from another round of shells. Tommy could feel the fear coming from Freddie and Danny like another presence in the tunnel. His own terror was lessening—or maybe sinking down deeper—leaving him feeling cold, his mouth dry but his mind clear. Even his headache was fading.

“Do you both still have your picks?” Tommy asked, and even he was a little concerned by how even his voice had suddenly become. Two noises of assent. “Right then, we’ll need to tunnel at an angle. Along the original tunnel route, so we can take advantage of any areas that aren’t caved in. We were 38 feet underground when the collapse happened. We’ll have to go a lot further than that to avoid the whole thing coming down on us again, but it should be possible.” It was much more than possible that they would run out of air, that the tunnel would collapse further, that they would hit a lethal pocket of natural gas, or that they would simply die of hunger before they reached the surface.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Freddie said, with his signature combination of irony and genuine optimism. 

“How’s the shoulder? Can you move?” Tommy asked. It was deeply disconcerting to be so utterly blind, to be reliant on Freddie’s own report. 

“Just about. This arm’s been doing its best to fall off this whole war and hasn’t managed it yet, so I imagine it’ll keep a while longer.”

“Good.” Tommy moved in the direction of Freddie’s voice, since he had been the furthest up the tunnel. Suddenly there was a hand on his chest, and Tommy flinched.

“Sorry, sir,” Danny said. He sounded terribly hesitant, but he made his point anyway. “I think I should go first for a while, since I’m the only one not hurt at all.”

Tommy hesitated. His instinct was to lead, but Danny was right. Tommy was weaker on his best day, and that certainly wasn’t today. Still. “We’ll go single file. Signal me when you’re tired, and we’ll swap places.”

“Understood, sir.”

And so they began. They worked in silence, mostly, each of them painfully aware of the limited amount of oxygen available, trying to conserve it. _Thunk. Thunk. Thunk,_ went Danny’s pick. Tommy kept the area clear, his ears trained on the sound of Freddie’s harsh breathing. Very quickly, the world devolved into a litany of sensations. Crumbling chalk, stale air, the pounding in Tommy’s head. The pick, carving that relentless rhythm.

_Thunk. Thunk. Thunk._

The collapsed earth shifted more easily than fresh chalk, which was both a blessing and a curse. It wasn’t long at all before all three of them were fully inside the new tunnel, but that meant that Freddie had to try to keep the back end clear or risk losing their meagre air supply. Tommy found himself reaching out repeatedly to brush Danny’s foot, seeking assurance that he was still there. Sounds were bouncing strangely, and it was hard to tell where anything was. Tommy’s eyes hurt from straining against no light and eventually he let them fall closed. Though that only made him focus more on the dull pounding in his head. He hadn’t eaten or slept even before the collapse. That could make the difference now, between living and dying. Such a very thin line.

A chunk of chalk hit Tommy in the shoulder, and he couldn’t quite stifle his grunt of pain. Immediately, the pick fell silent.

“Have we got a match between us? Can’t bloody see where I’m putting this stuff,” Danny said.

“Waste of air,” Tommy responded. There was too little as it was. It felt like his face was pressed into a thick wool blanket. 

“Not if I kill one of you with a rock. Freddie, you all right?”

“Fine,” but his response was slow in coming and sounded pained. Tommy grit his teeth in frustration. 

“Freddie, get in front of me. I’ll take the back for now,” Tommy decided. He couldn’t risk losing Freddie in the dark. He had no idea how bad that wound was. “Danny, push the rubble to the right and I’ll clear it out. Freddie, you stay to the left and try not to bleed out.” 

“I’m not that useless,” Freddie protested, but Tommy could hear him moving. The tunnel was too small to go around, so Freddie ended up having to pull himself over Tommy’s back, cursing viciously every time he jostled his shoulder. It didn’t feel good for Tommy either, Freddie’s weight pressing down on him, driving him into the dirt. How far had they climbed? Ten feet, maybe. It was impossible to tell. And how long before the uncomfortable air because unbreathable? It was better not to think about it. Much better to lose himself in clearing the back of the tunnel. 

The work went unbearably slowly. It was an act of will not to crawl up there and tear the pick from Danny’s hands, but Tommy knew that he could do no better. Slowly, so slowly, the loose chalk piled up behind them. The faint sounds of battle could be heard overhead, but it meant nothing. The fighting had become so constant as to be made irrelevant. Though it did make Tommy think of Arthur and John, wondering whether they too could hear shells. It would take a week, at least, for news of his death to reach the Ottoman Empire. Though Arthur or John could be dead already too. When had the last letter been? The endless digging had robbed Tommy of any sense of time, even before. What if Polly got all those letters at once?

She would light candles, and then she would go on.

Except that was what he wanted to think. That hadn’t been the case after Anna and Michael, had it? Could Ada manage alone for however long it took for Polly to come back? Assuming she did, of course. Ada would do her best for Finn, but business couldn’t be good with a war on. No one had any money to spare. Anything for Finn, not that that was necessarily a good thing. And if their father showed back up…

Tommy was so preoccupied imagining the worst case scenarios that he bumped directly into Freddie. He expected some kind of mockery, but Freddie just exhaled sharply. 

“Freddie?”

“M’fine.” He wasn’t fine, and if he wasn’t fine and if he couldn’t dig, Tommy and Danny would have to leave him. There were no other options and the knowledge settled like a stone in Tommy’s gut. Not because Tommy wouldn’t be able to leave him, but because he knew he would. His oldest friend, and he would let him suffocate in this hell. It wasn’t a choice he wanted to watch himself make. 

“You’re losing too much blood. I’m going to have to bind it.” Tommy felt his way to Freddie’s shoulder. He was rewarded with a gasp when he touched it.

“Everything all right, sir?” Danny asked, briefly pausing in his work.

“Keep digging,” Tommy instructed, fumbling to get his headband off. It wasn’t exactly sanitary, but it would have to do. Freddie’s chest was slick where he’d bled through his uniform. Tommy dug his ration of rum from the inside of his jacket and proceeded to douse both the headband and what he hoped was Freddie’s wound. Judging by Freddie’s scream, he’d at least gotten it mostly right. Freddie slumped against Tommy arm. Tommy had to hold him up while he fumbled once more for the standard issue bandages. He had lost his pack somewhere in the explosion, but he kept his medical kit in one of his pockets. Something an old corporal had shown him when he first joined up. Not that it had helped the man when a grenade had blown his legs off at the hip.

Freddie was panting heavily, trying to breathe through Tommy’s ministrations.

“Freddie?”

“Yeah?” he responded, but he sounded only half present, his head heavy against Tommy’s arm. Tommy wasn’t in the habit of talking much, not anymore, so he wasn’t quite sure why now felt like the moment to start. Only that it was.

“Do you remember the time with that suffragette girl?” Tommy began. He could feel Freddie’s heart thundering, pushing out more blood with every beat. “You were staring at her when the bloody copper got behind you with one of his batons. Got you right in the head, which wouldn’t have been funny except—“

“—Wasn’t funny,” Freddie mumbled, but his breathing was starting to calm. Tommy was still wrapping the bandage. He could only hope the placement was alright.

“Except you landed right in a pile of horse shit. So sure, most men would go home after this, but you, being rather persistent, picked yourself right up and walked up to her, still covered in shit. And you asked if you might have the honour of walking with her. That girl took one look at you and said, ‘well, we may have moved out of our proper sphere and into the world of men and all that, but we still have standards.’ Then she turned right around and went back to her friends.” Tommy was too out of practice for the imitation to be any good, and his voice cracked a little bit, but Danny chucked nonetheless.

“Never told me that one, did you Freddie?”

“Greta nearly wet herself,” Freddie said, clearer this time, and Tommy made an effort not to stiffen. It was the first time someone had said her name to him in more than three years. He tied off the bandage.

“Better?”

“Mm. Didn’t think you even remembered those days, Tommy.” Tommy bit back his reply. Of course he remembered. But it was too easy down here, once you slipped into fantasy, never to return. And Freddie still refused to address him properly.

“Stop giving me that look,” Freddie said, and Tommy could hear the smirk in his voice, even through the pain.

“My eyes are closed,” he bit back, and that was true. There was no use in straining against the dark.  
“I can still tell, Tom. If it makes you feel better, you can write me up for insubordination, but we have to get out of here first.”

It was such a relief to hear Freddie talking in complete sentences that Tommy decided not to continue arguing. Freddie was right after all. “Let me take over for a while, Danny. You must need a rest.”

Danny’s pick went silent, and the man heaved in a deep breath. “Thank you, sir. We’re making good progress.” That was complete bravado. Tommy knew that Danny had no better idea than he did how far they had gotten, but he appreciated the effort nonetheless.

It was an ordeal once again to crawl over each other to take up their new places. Tommy was persistently aware of how much time they were losing. The air wasn’t too much thinner, but he worried that was because he had lost the ability to tell. His head spun, but that could have been from any number of things, none of which he had any control over right now.

Tommy gathered up his own pick and set to work.

Behind him, Danny took up the task of checking in with Freddie, making sure he was holding up. Danny was good that way. He always knew what needed doing. 

It wasn’t long before Tommy felt the calluses on his hands begin to rub raw. He was working faster than normal, his arms already leaden. It was important to get as far as possible while there was enough air. They would only get weaker. Knowing that, it was worrying how weak he already felt, how much the pick seemed to weigh in his hand. He found himself looking blindly up at the ceiling, wondering just how much chalk stood between them and fresh air. Too much, he couldn’t help but think. 

Wrapping the injury had brought back another memory, not the one he’d shared with Freddie. The other time he’d bound a wound in total darkness. Small Heath wasn’t a tunnel, but there hadn’t been any street lights either, not when he was a child. He remembered the panic in Arthur’s voice when he told him he would have to be quiet. Their father was stumbling around downstairs and Arthur insisted they had just been sparring, but his face was bleeding all over both of them and one of his ribs didn’t feel right. Tommy had bound the ribs the best he could without being able to see anything and when Arthur couldn’t hold in his pain anymore Tommy had stuck his arm into Arthur’s mouth and his brother had bit down until Tommy was bleeding. But their father hadn’t heard them, and when Charlie Strong asked Tommy what had happened to his arm, the bite mark clearly visible, he had said it was a horse and vowed to himself that he would get out of Small Heath one day.

Well, he was out now.

“Shelby,” came Freddie’s voice out of the darkness. Apparently, that was as close as he was willing to get to proper address.

“Yeah?” Tommy’s mouth was dry. He’d given most of his water to Freddie.

“I’ve been thinking what I wouldn’t give for some pure, stinking Birmingham air right now,” Freddie said.

“Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?” Tommy answered, working to keep his tone light. It was hard when it grated so much on his throat. His hands were starting to slip on the pick, and he kept having to readjust his grip. 

“Be so fucking glad to see a smoke stack,” Freddie continued. Tommy grimaced into the blackness. Freddie might be grateful, but Tommy wasn’t. He was never grateful. He was only ever digging, and hoping not to get buried again. 

“I’d drink out of the cut if it got me back home,” Danny added. 

“That’s disgusting.” Tommy could picture the look on Freddie’s face. “Still, you’ve got a point. Better to be shitting yourself with dysentery at home than in fucking France.”

Tommy hit something that wasn’t rock. It gave too easily. Tommy set down his pick and used his hands to clear the rubble around whatever it was. Danny and Freddie were still talking, but Tommy had lost the thread of their conversation. Once he had cleared enough away, his hands returned, seemingly of their own will, to the thing his pick had hit. 

It was soft. Tommy’s hands were sore, rubbed raw from digging, and it was good to touch something soft. It was slippery too. And yet somehow he didn’t put the pieces together until the smell hit him.

The bile rose without warning and Tommy retched violently. His headache, which had faded to a background hum, returned with a vengeance. His chest began to tighten and he pushed himself backwards and the darkness was a living thing, squeezing him to death.

“Sir?”

“Tommy? What’s happened? Are you all right?” Barely audible over the ringing in his ears, and then there was someone on top of him, and he kicked out on instinct because if it was that thing—

“Tommy, you’ve got to calm—oh fucking hell! Fuck!” Someone else—Freddie?—was gagging too, and strangely that brought Tommy back a little bit. Enough so that the next time Danny asked what was going on, Tommy was able to string a sentence together.

“We’ve dug into a body. Fresh. One of the men.” The smell of blood was strong now, and there was brain between Tommy’s fingers, but at least he couldn’t see it. He clawed that fragile distance back into himself, and it was such a relief when that unnerving coolness settled back over him that he thought he might faint. Freddie was still choking, and the scent of vomit was mingling with the blood and death. “We have to get around it,” Tommy whispered, hoarse but steady again.

Freddie was still half on top of him, gulping in the thin, rancid air. Tommy didn’t try to get him off, but he started talking quietly to him, blocking out the stench with his mind. “We’ll dig over it, yeah? Nothing else we can do now. Just keep digging. Soon enough it’ll be behind us. Nothing else we can do.” Tommy was rambling a little bit, finding the rhythm he used for the horses when they were spooked. Gradually, Freddie’s breathing calmed. The next time he spoke, his voice was flat. 

“They’re all dead, aren’t they, Tommy? They didn’t get out,” Freddie’s mouth was next to Tommy’s ear, too quiet for Danny to hear.

“Aye, they’re dead,” Tommy breathed back. And maybe that wasn’t true, but the darkness and the blood on his hands were telling him that it was. 

There was a pause.

“All right then,” Freddie said, a little louder. Then he began the work of squirming back behind Tommy into his original position. The contortions must have hurt his shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice it. 

Tt there was one more thing Tommy had to do. Before he could think too much about it, he reached out, over the squelching softness, past a nose. The nose was small and pointed and he tried not to think through the men’s faces to match that nose with someone who had once been alive. He kept reaching until his hands closed around cold metal. He ripped off the dog tags and withdrew his hand quickly. If they ever made it to the surface, Tommy would have the chance to learn whose brain he had stuck his hand into. 

Forgoing the pick because his hands were too slippery, Tommy started to dig again. Quickly, he reburied the body, digging up and over, trying not to think about the cold flesh only a few inches underneath them. The faster he dug, the sooner they would be away from it. For a long time, there was no conversation, only the slow slide of rubble, the distant crash of shells, and three sets of breath, relentlessly chewing up oxygen. 

At some point, the other man’s blood on his hands was replaced by Tommy’s own. He imagined that his hands must hurt, that the fingernails were torn off from the beds, but truth be told he couldn’t feel it. The smell of blood remained. Tommy couldn’t tell whether they had hit a hidden pocket of air, but breathing continued to be possible, if not easy. They were moving upwards, slowly.

It felt like he was asleep. There wasn’t a real difference, down here, between asleep and awake, as long as he kept moving. With every foot they advanced, Tommy half-expected to come upon the squish of another body, but they didn’t. Maybe that meant they had travelled above the line of the original tunnel. Or else they were just missing them. Tommy imagined hands in the walls he couldn’t see, reaching, inches away from breaking through. 

Polly had asked him, the night before they were due to leave, why he was going off to fight in this war. She grabbed him by the wrist with her strong fingers and demanded an answer with something like fury. Tommy had smiled, broken her grip, and told her that he’d flipped a coin. But the question had come back to him often in the early days, when he was a spindly recruit fumbling with a gun that he wasn’t even certain he could fire.

He learned the answer during his first real battle, but it wasn’t something he could ever tell Polly. He’d been aboveground then, just another soldier to be sent over the top, watching as the men around him went pale and tense, some of them losing their bowels and others their wits. Tommy was afraid too, of course, but he had thought he’d known fear before, and this was something different.

In Small Heath, fear was no food on the table and Dad’s uneven footsteps and the day their mother’s corpse had soaked through the kitchen table. It was Greta’s hacking cough and Polly screaming for her children. Most of all, it was the dread that it would always be this way. 

In France, people were shooting at him. Tommy had to shoot back and do his best to avoid getting hit. It was disconcertingly simple. 

And if he did happen to get hit, well, it would get even simpler. So long as John or Arthur wasn’t the one to find his body.

“Tommy.”

And now. Tommy had to dig, or he would die. It was a fear that he felt himself growing ever more comfortable with, pulling on and encasing himself in like a reliable old jacket. 

“ _Tommy._ ” That was Freddie, and it sounded urgent.

“What?” Tommy’s voice sounded awful. How much time had passed? How far had they gone? He had lost all concept of measurement. His head was throbbing, but his hands were numb. Somehow, he had lost his pick completely. It should’ve been at his belt, but wasn’t. He fumbled for it, but his hands…

“We need to swap. Unless you plan on digging until you give yourself a heart attack.” Now that Freddie mentioned it, Tommy’s heart was beating rather loudly. He could hear it in his ears. 

“You can’t. Your shoulder,” Tommy reasoned, but the words came out a little muddled. A long time, was how long they’d been digging. Tommy brought his hands to his chest, but his arms were so stiff now that he had stopped digging that he could barely get them started again. There was meaning in that observation. Somewhere. He tilted into the tunnel wall, eyes shut tight against the blinding darkness.

“You’re fucking unbelievable. Move over.” Sounds of movement. Any sound other than digging was alien.

“What?” There wasn’t really anywhere to move to. The tunnel had gotten tighter without Tommy noticing. It was less stable too, loose soil mixed with the chalk. Did that mean that they were closer to the surface? Or just closer to it all falling in and burying them completely? 

Tommy felt fingers on his face, pinching him. He shook them off, and the empty nausea rose briefly in his stomach. 

“Move, you complete fucking idiot,” Freddie said again, and this time Tommy managed to do it, scooting on his elbows until he nearly kicked Danny.

“Here, sir.” Tommy groped with numb arms for whatever Danny was handing him and found himself holding a flask. His arms were shaking badly but he managed to bring it to his mouth and the tepid water that flowed out cleared his head a little. 

“Thank you.” His voice still sounded rough and it took several tries to get the flask back to Danny in the total darkness. The sound of the pick had started up. Freddie was digging. Slowly, as if underwater rather than underground, Tommy began to clear the rubble with hands that he thought probably didn’t have any skin left. The slightest pressure made them scream, but he ignored it. The earth pressed in on them, remaking their tomb with every foot they climbed. There was no way to look back at their progress. The progress that started with a faulty bomb that could still—

“Sergeant Major,” Danny whispered, and Tommy wished he would stop. For all he laid into Freddie about proper rank, Danny’s words made him shiver. Didn’t he know that now it was only a reminder of all the men he’d failed? He should have sent them up the tunnel earlier. He had known, when he heard those shovels coming. He had felt that they would be the last ones and if his ramshackle, fortune-telling childhood had taught him anything, it was to trust those instincts. But he hadn’t, and the others had paid the price. 

“What, Danny?” Tommy snapped, after realising that it had been too long.

“We’re going to make it out of here.”

Tommy had nothing to say to that, so he just kept moving rocks, and hurting, blocking everything out except for the pain. 

They passed around the last of the flasks of water, only enough to make their throats hurt more and taste of dirt. There was a little rum too, and that at least tasted like rum. Danny took his turn digging again, and Tommy slept, at some point, sitting up. The air was so thin, and Tommy found himself wondering if it was like this on top of a mountain. He didn’t really know what a mountain even looked like, and he’d never had any desire to climb one, but now the thought of that much sky was blissful. Even if the air was thin. Was it all the same at the very top and the very bottom? 

It didn’t matter because Tommy was never going to find out.

The tunnel had started to cave in behind them. At some point, though Tommy’s blurring senses could only tell him that it was later, a huge hunk of soil half-buried Freddie. It took them a good few minutes to dig him out, and by the time they got him free, the numbness in Tommy’s hands had spread all the way to his elbows, interrupted only by occasional lightning bolts of pain. The earth shook above them. The nearer to the surface the nearer to the shells the nearer to another cave in. Tommy slept again, and he woke to the feeling of Freddie dragging him forwards. The blood that had soaked through Freddie’s bandages mixed with the dirt in Tommy’s hair and they were going to die down here. The space they could keep clear grew smaller and smaller and they pressed together. It might be nice if the air ran out completely. Better than being blown up, at least. About as peaceful as war got. 

Of course, as hours stretched and the end neared, Danny was the one who clung on relentlessly. 

“When I get back,” Danny said into the blackness, breathless from lack of air, but still chopping away with his pick. “I’m going to hug my boys so tight, and never mind if they’re embarrassed.”

Freddie joined in, though Tommy could hear the pain and desperation in his voice. “I’m going to stand on the roof of the BSA, and I’m going to scream until every man in Birmingham is screaming with me. And then we’ll march, and they’ll finally see us,” he said.

As if the same men who could accept a thousand volunteers, tell them to bury themselves alive, and then not bother to coordinate the attack well enough to make their deaths mean anything, would give a shit. Freddie was something of a miracle, really. Even now, down here, he was untouched. He could talk like he’d talked in The Garrison, back when they were young and still alive. But Tommy didn’t point out the lack of logic.

“I’m going to buy my own horse,” he said instead. The first thing he thought of. A white mare, without a speck of dirt on her. 

“What’ll you name him?” Freddie asked thinly.

“Friedrich Engels,” Tommy said, just to annoy him. Though it was a fitting name for a fantasy horse. All things equally distant.

From far away, there was a rumble. Freddie didn’t get a chance to retort, because the rumble grew, getting closer and closer.

All other sound stopped, and the rumble continued to grow until it was everything and there was dirt raining down and this was—finally—it. 

Tommy could feel the dirt in his eyes and his ears and his mouth and even though he knew it was the end, he found himself still digging. Scrabbling, upwards now because there was no other way. He might have heard a yell but he couldn’t be sure because the rumble was so loud. His legs were stuck but he was still kicking and pulling and drowning and the sounds quieted but now it was the thumping in his ears of his heart and his blood pounding because there was no air and no air and when his right arm couldn’t pull anymore his first thought was that it had fallen off but then

Air.

His one free arm cleared the space for his head, and he gagged out the dirt, turned to mud in his mouth. The first breath of fresh air was so intoxicating that Tommy nearly passed out, everything spinning lazily for a few seconds. He tried to open his eyes, but the light was too much and he closed them quickly and focused on breathing. His chest was tight, still trapped in the earth, but it didn’t matter. Slowly, his eyes adjusted, though his vision was blurry and full of grit. The land around Tommy was barren and desolate. No Man’s Land or behind the line? He was alone.

Except not. The ground next to Tommy moved.

Before he could fully process what that meant, his free arm was digging into the earth, tearing it up once again. When he felt hair, he yanked without thinking, and Freddie’s head came up, like pulling a potato out of the ground. More movement and Danny was pushing himself out too, only a foot or so away. They were basically on top of each other. For a minute more, it was only heaving breaths and looking into each other’s faces. They looked so strange, caked in dirt. Tommy was just conjuring the breath to say something, anything, when Freddie started to laugh.

It was hysterical and hoarse. Immediately, Danny joined in and then Tommy did too, not sure why, his chest heaving painfully. They laughed and laughed and the tears streaked down their faces and washed the dirt out of their eyes and they laughed. And Tommy thought that if a stray shell found them now, that would be pretty funny too, because here they were, three disembodied heads laughing themselves sick in a field full of corpses.

They laughed until they lost their voices, and then they must have fallen asleep. Tommy still had one arm dangling aboveground. 

It didn’t even occur to him to try to dig himself the rest of the way out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read a real first hand account of a couple of men who dug themselves out of a collapsed tunnel in WW1 and took from that the idea of the boys freeing their heads and then just sitting there, mostly buried, until help came. Too good a visual to pass up. I wonder whether Steven Knight read the same account. Hmm.


	3. Decaying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy is back above ground. For now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fucking finally. Hey, at least we're not all buried alive. I hope you find Tommy's pain as gratifying as I do.

The next thing Tommy was aware of was shouting. There were hands all over him, poking and prodding. Someone pulled his legs out from the dirt and it felt like a loss. More shouting. He was lying down. On a stretcher? He couldn’t lift his head high enough to check, but there was movement underneath him and pain that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The sky above was frighteningly blue. It didn’t look real. More like a painting. Tommy closed his eyes.

When the world returned, it was in fragments. The smell of blood and antiseptic. The itch of a thin blanket on his exposed neck. He reached up to scratch at his neck, but found that his arms wouldn’t move. His eyes flew open.

There was a dilapidated cross high above his head, one of its arms bent at an angle. Tommy stared at it for several seconds before it made sense of it. A church? No, a bombed out convent that had been turned into a field hospital. Hence the antiseptic. Ignoring the childish impulse to delay the inevitable, Tommy looked down at his arms. They were still there, which was a relief. His hands were swathed in bandages so thick that they didn’t even look like hands anymore. His arms were limp, but there weren’t any bones sticking out or joints obviously out of place. Strange. He didn’t know what was wrong. He thought briefly about asking someone, but the world beyond his bed was chaos. Nurses were running back and forth to the tune of groaning men, and since most of them actually were missing something or other, it seemed like a waste of time for Tommy to ask why his arms wouldn’t move. 

Tommy let his head fall back. He went back to looking at the cross for a while. He drifted. 

“You in the 179th?” The voice came from Tommy’s right. He twisted his aching neck to the side to see a soldier in the bed next to him with a patch over one eye. His uniform was half-covered and Tommy couldn’t see his rank, though his accent was London. Posh.

“Yes,” Tommy responded, his throat burning at the effort. Where were Danny and Freddie? He should’ve thought of them first, not his own bloody arms. His men were—They were gone.

“Well fuck me,” the other man said, his tone confirming Tommy’s fears. 

“My section was buried. Three of us dug out,” Tommy said, despite himself. Already, the memory was fading into some kind of blurred nightmare, without even visuals to go with it. Just the sound of the pick and the slick wetness between his fingers.

The other man gave a strangled laugh, that laugh that people developed on the front that had nothing to do with humour. “Not just your section, lad. The whole bloody company. The Boche knew what we were up to and retreated to their reserve trench. Blew their bombs to trigger ours. Sure, they lost a good deal of their trench, but they took a hell of a lot more of our men with them. Smart bastards. It’s not fast to train a whole new company of tunnellers.”

Tommy turned his head away, allowing that to sink in. Two hundred men and months of work, undone in a matter of minutes. The other man continued, answering the questions that Tommy didn’t have the energy to ask. “The tunnels blew six days ago. No one thought there’d be any survivors at all. They found you and the other two though. That was right before my eye got fucked. Not that that it makes much difference for my war. I expect I’ll be back out there in a day or so. Don’t need two eyes to read maps and make decisions.”

“I can’t move my arms,” Tommy’s voice sounded strangely distant, but he had to tell someone. The nurses were busy with the men who didn’t even have arms.

“You must’ve torn the muscles with all that digging.” There was a brief silence, and Tommy knew the other man was contemplating what that much digging felt like. Tommy couldn’t have told him even if he’d asked. He didn’t. “Well, not enough to send you home, I’m afraid. They’ll need your experience down there. If you can stomach it. Even if you can’t, to be honest.” Another one of those terrible laughs. 

“Our charge didn’t blow.”

“Luck of the devil, isn’t it? You’ll get a medal for certain,” the other man said.

“Already got one.” A cold, thin piece of metal, gripped in between his bloody fingers. He remembered. Tommy cleared his throat. “Would you mind…there’s something in my breast pocket. Could you—“ He hadn’t even finished the question before the other man—was it worth learning his name?—had rolled over and was reaching across the scant space between their beds. When he moved, Tommy saw the insignia on his sleeve. He was a Captain. Tommy had thought, vaguely, that CCOs would recuperate somewhere where the enlisted men weren’t allowed. Tommy shouldn’t be talking to him this way. But the captain was already rooting around in Tommy’s pockets, so there wasn’t much to be done. 

The dog tags were streaked with dried blood, and the captain had to spit on them to make them legible again. 

“Hmm, let’s see. Private Reginald Smith. Was he with you in the collapse?”

Tommy looked away from the man’s piercing look, not answering. Smitty. Of course it would be him. Not that it mattered. Smitty was only the one he…found. The others were down there too, hundreds of them, slowly getting eaten back into the earth. Tommy’s right hand was trembling, sensation sparking painfully up and down, the bandage rocking unsteadily. 

“I’ll deal with these,” the captain said, business-like. “Have them sent to his family. That’s why you took them, right?” There wasn’t enough air, even up here, where there was supposed to be nothing but air. Wherever he went, drowning.

“Hey, you survived,” the captain continued. “It’s just luck. You couldn’t have done anything different.”

Tommy tried to focus on that cross, tried to breathe. The captain spoke some more, but his voice blended into a background hum, drowned out by Tommy’s pulse, thudding through his head. After a small eternity, Tommy’s breathing slowed enough for his eyes to get heavy. Even as he felt the pull of oblivion, the words that the captain had intended to be comforting stayed with him.

_You couldn’t have done anything different._

But wasn’t that the problem?

***

When Tommy woke again, he turned his head to the right. The captain was gone, his bed now filled by a man whose entire head was wrapped in bandages. A nurse was leaned over him, painstakingly spooning soup into the hole over the man’s mouth. He gave no indication of being awake, except that his throat bobbed as he swallowed. He looked like nothing so much as one of the baby barn swallows from the stable, waiting for their mother to feed them. Except the barn swallows hadn’t been covered in blood-dotted bandaging.

The nurse replaced the spoon and looked up from her work, right at Tommy. She started slightly, surprised to see him awake. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she was worrying at her lower lip, which was already cracked. She was staring at him like he was a problem that needed solving.

Tommy moistened the inside of his mouth. “What?”

She flinched again. How old was she? Seventeen? She looked like a child, and there was blood on her uniform. “You’re awake, so you need to eat. But…” she glanced down the long row of beds, and Tommy noticed for the first time the cart at the end of the bed, laden with more bowls of soup. Ready to be spooned into the mouths of the other baby birds. Someone down the row made a piercing, keening noise. Tommy looked down at his heavily bandaged arms. They were finished being numb and had started to pulse with pain, in time with his heartbeat. 

“I’ll manage,” he said. It was only soup. Surely, he could manage. 

The nurse took a deep breath. “Don’t tell anyone.” Then she crossed over to his bed and, without warning, hoisted Tommy into a sitting position by his armpits. Under the light frock, her arm muscles were strong enough to be a tunneller’s. 

“In return,” Tommy said quietly, while she was still bent over him. “Freddie Thorne and Daniel Owen. They came in with me. Find them and let me know.” 

“They were the other two,” she said, not a question, and Tommy nodded. Was that how they were known now? The three from the 179th. And what about the others? The ones who never even got the chance to dig their way out? They wouldn’t be known at all.

The nurse set his soup on a tray in his lap and darted off to the next bed in her area without a backwards glance.

Tommy watched her get on with her work for a while before turning his attention to the soup. He didn’t feel hungry, but that was nothing unusual.

Experimentally, Tommy bent his arms at the elbow. He could do it, although his eyes watered from the pain. Two beds over, a man was muttering a prayer. In Hebrew? Hopefully his God wasn’t too particular about the place of worship. Tommy could feel the cross hanging above his head, even when he wasn’t looking at it.

The soup.

Tommy’s hands were too heavily bandaged to grasp the bowl properly, but he could sort of clamp it between his fists. The spoon was out of the question, and he swallowed hard, delaying the inevitable. He had avoided one brand of humiliation and was now saddled with another. In the scheme of the things he had done in the last few days, it was nothing, but the sweat dripping down his back wasn’t only from pain. Men were dying. There were thousands of corpses within a few miles of him, and yet Tommy stared at his soup with a knot in his stomach.

This was ridiculous. He secured the bowl between his hands, then brought his head down to meet it. He drank quick and clumsy, desperate to get it over with. Some of the liquid slopped over the edge and stained his bandages. A few chunks of meat went up his nose and he nearly choked, but he kept going. He didn’t stop until he had gotten every last drop down.

The bowl clattered back down onto the tray. Tommy swatched it tremble into stillness while he swallowed convulsively, willing the food to stay down. Here he was, embarrassed about using a bowl like a trough when McEwan’s family would soon learn that their son had died for a country he wanted no part of. He and Hinchford had always been close, and they had headed back up the tunnel together. He imagined their heads like Smitty’s, smashed together and mingling underground like—

Tommy lurched over the bowl, certain he was going to be sick, but instead one of his hands knocked against the side of the bed. His vision went white for awhile.

When the pain receded, Tommy found himself curled awkwardly around his useless arms, staring over the side of the bed. The tray and bowl were on the floor. They were tin, so nothing was broken. He half-expected the nurse to reappear, or someone else to ask after him, but no one came. The nausea was bearable by then, if not completely gone. Nothing particularly compelled Tommy to move, so he didn’t.

It was dark when the nurse returned, the moans of pain around Tommy now interspersed with snores. She cleared up the tray and the bowl without asking what had happened to them. By candlelight, her face looked old. Skeletal. There was something about war that made the bones want to poke through early. 

As she knelt next to his bed, she whispered, “Daniel Owen is three rows over. Similar injuries to yours, expected to make a full recovery. Freddie Thorne has a wound in his shoulder, in addition to muscle tearing around the arms, that has become infected. He’s feverish and the doctor said it was too early to tell. Then he gave me a rap on the knuckles for asking too many questions, so you’d better be grateful.”  
“Where?” Tommy rasped. He found himself focusing on her candle, using it to block out the darkness all around him. He was out. 

“Patients aren’t allowed to move around the ward—” she began, but something in his face must’ve changed her mind. “Two over, twelve to your left. Don’t get caught.” 

And what would they do if they caught him? As soon as his arms were functional again, Tommy knew he’d be back underground. Somehow, the threat of an overworked doctor scolding him for being out bed didn’t feel very worrisome.

Tommy waited for the nurse to leave his section, wondering idly if she would be relieved soon. She must have been on shift for nearly twelve hours. Then again, when a battle lasted months, the demand must be high. Logistics were easy to think about. It was comforting to imagine the men in these beds as numbers that needed to be moved and categorised, the same as with betting. The hopes of a thousand men boiled down to simple odds, easily manipulated.

It was time to move.

Tommy sat up easily enough without using his arms. Everything ached, but he had certainly had worse. He swung his legs unsteadily around the side of the cot, then stood up. The world swam and before he could stop himself, Tommy had put a hand out to steady himself.

This was a very bad idea. As soon as Tommy put weight on the arm, it crumpled, and he went down with it. Only long practice stopped him making a sound as he folded to the floor in a graceless heap, curling protectively around his arms like they were worth a thousand pounds. He stayed there for a while, trying to think through it. His breathing loud, and that wasn’t helping because it was the breathing, wasn’t it? That was what he remembered from the hours (days?) that they spent digging. The bloody breathing. 

Eventually, the need to see Freddie outweighed the difficulty of making his way there. Having learned that using his arms was not an option, Tommy tried some sort of rocking motion back and forth that eventually got him the momentum he needed to stand up. Success. He swallowed down the nausea and picked his way along the beds. One or two men looked at him as he went, but their eyes were blank and he ignored them. 

Tommy recognised Freddie from the spreadeagled way that he lay, overflowing the bounds of the cot. He looked asleep, but as Tommy approached, his eyes blinked open.

“Oh, good. You made it.” It was hard to see in the low light (better than before, so much better), but Tommy thought that Freddie’s cheeks were flushed. Tommy crouched down next to the cot.

“We’re both here. Somehow. We got out.” The memory had already faded to a mess of sensation. And yet it was here in the room between them, still with the power to kill Freddie.

“We got out,” Freddie echoed. He sounded a little blurry from the fever, but it was such a relief to hear him at all that Tommy hardly noticed. 

“Do you remember it?” He asked, not knowing what he was looking for. Validation, maybe, that it had been real after all. As if Smitty’s dog tags weren’t enough.

“I…don’t know. Some. You gotta get a horse.” 

It took a moment for Tommy to get what Freddie was talking about. “We have to survive the rest of this war first. They’ll send us back.”

“Bastards,” Freddie muttered.

Tommy smiled. He had missed this, he realised, over the last few years. Had lost something with Freddie without ever knowing what. And yet here they were, bound yet again by an experience that almost no one else understood. Freddie reached for Tommy’s right hand and grasped it tight, bringing it onto the bed with him.

“I hate it, Tommy. I hate every second of it,” Freddie hissed, sounding suddenly very awake. Tommy’s hand shrieked at the pressure but he didn’t pull away.

“We volunteered,” Tommy managed to grate out, half joke and half reminder.

“Every time they sent me down there and put a gun in my hand, I wanted to be sick. Maybe I’m a coward,” he said. Tommy knew that Freddie Thorne was anything but a coward. “I hate those bastards though, sitting behind their big desks and getting the rest of us killed. And most of us don’t even realise. If we just realised…” he trailed off.

“It’ll all be over soon enough. It’ll end,” Tommy promised, lying, feeling a little dizzy.

The silence after that was long enough that Tommy thought that Freddie had fallen asleep. Then, “We in a church?”

“Convent,” Tommy replied.

“Fuck.” Tommy had been an altar boy for a short while. Freddie, a few years younger, had dodged his way out of that. The Communists had no time for all that shiny stained glass. It was hard to hate shiny glass so much when you hadn’t seen the sky in days. For him, at least. Freddie was different. Purer, probably.

Again, Freddie lapsed into silence and again, Tommy might’ve thought he’d fallen asleep except that the grip on Tommy’s hand was too painfully tight. “We’ll get out of this,” Tommy whispered. They had dug their way out, and they would do it again. It wasn’t optimism, exactly.

“It’s not natural. It’s not right,” Freddie started up again. “A few men tell us that pointing our guns at some other bastards will save us when they’re the fucking ones who should be shot. It’s fucked up. We should never have gone.” Tommy felt a hard knot in the pit of his stomach.

“I know,” he said, even though he didn’t. Tommy didn’t regret joining up and he could feel Smitty’s brains, wet between his throbbing fingers, and he still would have signed that form. There was bile in the back of his throat and his other hand, the clean one, was trembling by his side. Freddie was right, but he remembered now. What they’d lost. And they weren’t going to get it back.

“This place is going to burn us up,” Freddie croaked, fussing with his blanket. “It’s so fucking hot.” His voice was less clear again. He pulled Tommy’s hand with him as he struggled to find a comfortable position. Tommy blinked away his pain and leaned in closer.

“I know it’s hot. It’s all right. It’s all right,” Tommy repeated, slow and steady. “You’re not going to burn.” _You’re_ not going to burn. “It’s all right.”

That was the end of Freddie talking coherently. Tommy didn’t know how long he stayed, crouching next to Freddie’s bed until his knees were on fire and his hand had gone numb again. He worried for a while that he would have to get a doctor, but eventually, mercifully, Freddie calmed. His breathing evened and his fingers slackened away from Tommy’s hand.

Tommy stood unsteadily and stumbled back to his own cot. He sat down on it, unable to even consider lifting the blanket to cover himself. Moonlight was slicing through the high convent windows, bathing the injured soldiers in an otherworldly glow. Tommy shivered, lying down gingerly. It seemed impossible that he would sleep, what with his hand returning to life with agonising sparks and hellfire waiting behind his eyelids every time he blinked. 

Moments later, it was morning.

His nurse was standing over him, carrying more soup. She was also glaring at him, her mouth thin with displeasure.

“What the fuck did you do?” He didn’t know what she was talking about until he followed her gaze down his arm.

The bandages around Tommy’s hand were red, soaked through with blood in a pattern that matched Freddie’s fingers. 

“It’s fine. “ She didn’t believe him, but after some more cajoling, he managed to get her to hand the soup over. He bent down over it and ignored the stripe of red in the corner of his vision.

***

Six days later, Tommy found himself in the wagon that would take him back to the trenches.

He could hold a spoon by that point, which meant that by extension he could hold a gun, even if his fingers were still wrapped and his arms felt weak and heavy. There were five other men in the wagon with him. Freddie wasn’t among them. His fever had finally broken, but he was still too weak to return to the front. Danny should be coming, but he hadn’t arrived yet. None of the others had done more than politely acknowledge Tommy, but he could feel their eyes on him. Clearly, news of what had happened to the 179th had travelled. 

Tommy tried to ignore them. He lit up a cigarette from his small, precious, stash and looked back out at the convent. The place had been abandoned before the war, already decaying, and the sense of slow death suited its new purpose. He was glad to be leaving the old building behind. Even if he knew that what he was going to was much worse.

One of Tommy’s wagon-mates was looking at him. Tommy watched him, a big man with a bushy beard and blacksmith’s hands, shift out of the corner of his eye. Knowing it was a stupid idea, Tommy lifted his gaze to meet the other man’s and stared hard at him. 

The big man broke first, as Tommy knew he would. Aunt Polly was the only person Tommy had ever lost a staring contest to, and this man had none of her steel. Satisfied that he had been properly told off, Tommy closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the splintery wood of the wagon. 

He was still in that position when the big man decided to push his luck. “We could hear the collapse, you know,” he said. “Like an earthquake or some shit. You’re fucking insane to go back down there. How the hell are you gonna manage? I’d rather get fucking shot.”

Tommy’s eyes snapped back open. What a stupid question. There was no how in war.

“Woah. I don’t mean nothing by it, Sergeant Major, sir,” the big man said, stammering slightly, hands in the air. Tommy was a little taken aback by the man’s obvious fear. He hadn’t even moved. He was used to men following his orders by now. And before, he’d been used to the ones who spat at him for his Gypsy unnatural eyes. But this man was afraid, and Tommy hadn’t even moved. 

“Alright, we’re off now. Hold on or you’ll go flying out the back, mind,” came the cheery Welsh voice of the approaching driver, followed closely by Danny. The moment was broken. Tommy turned away. It was strange to see Danny not covered in mud. He seemed almost to shine. The others made room for Danny next to Tommy. None of them looked at him, but if Danny was aware of the tension, he didn’t show it. 

“Good to see you again, sir,” Danny said warmly, nodding politely at the other men. 

“All right, Danny?” Tommy asked as he lit up another of his cigarettes and passed it over.

“Can’t believe it’s only been a week, sir. Feels like a lifetime,” Danny said. _That’s because it was,_ Tommy wanted to say, but didn’t. He didn’t want Danny to agree with him. The wagon jolted into motion, slowly leaving the convent behind. They rode in silence for a while.

“You were right,” Tommy said. He didn’t know what had compelled him to speak. Danny gave him a strange look. The other men were studiously looking anywhere but at the two of them. “Down there. You said that we would get out, and you were right. Me and Freddie—we couldn’t have done it without you.”

Danny stared at him, pale blue eyes blown wide. The man to Tommy’s left had become suddenly obsessed with his cigarette case. Tommy didn’t give a fuck. 

“Really?” Danny sounded different, almost afraid.

“Yes,” Tommy said firmly. Danny stared at him for a moment before shaking his head.

“Fuck.”

There wasn’t anything else to say, was there? Tommy turned to look out the back of the wagon, watching the French countryside recede behind them. There was little evidence of war here, and the grass was green. Summer heat rose up from the ground along with an army of flies. The air was full of the smell of flowers that Tommy didn’t recognise.

He was out.

The reality hit him without warning, and there were tears in his eyes. He willed them away. The touch of the light breeze on the exposed inch of his wrist was almost overwhelming, as though he had never felt it before. This was the world, and he was still part of it. It didn’t matter that he would be going back below ground. That was temporary and held no secrets now. The earth could throw its worst at him now. Tommy had already dug his way out.

In the distance, he could see a horse in one of the fields, ambling along as it munched on grass. He imagined how easy it would be to jump off the back of the wagon and go running for that horse. He might even make it. 

It wasn’t the shame of desertion that stopped him from really considering it. It wasn’t King and Country either, though maybe somewhere under the soot there was a Birmingham worth dying for. It wasn’t his fellow men, who would like as not soon be nothing more than fellow limbs, blown to pieces in the mud. 

Freddie would’ve run, probably. And maybe he would be right to. But Tommy knew that this was just passing through, that there was a war just ahead, and there had never really been anywhere to run. Not even in the beginning.

***

A few hours later, they arrived at the reserve trenches. Tommy wasn’t sorry to see his wagon mates go as he and Danny trudged through the mud to their station. After days of relative quiet, the shells were both loud and exactly as he remembered them.

They passed several tunnelling shafts on their way. Tommy forced himself to look into the blackness. Danny talked, chattering about how he was looking forward to watching Tommy whip whatever crow bags they were handed into fighting shape. Tommy nodded along, letting the taste of the trench fill his lungs.

Ten recruits were waiting for them.

They watched Tommy with appraising eyes as he and Danny picked their way over, wondering what kind of leader Tommy would be. Whether he was the kind that was going to get them killed. Braddock had never liked Tommy, and it occurred to him suddenly that he might have known. All those weeks, that feeling that Tommy would be the one to get him killed. It was pure fantasy, of course, but it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Tommy forced his mind away from the ghosts. The new men looked fresh-faced. Tommy knew they weren’t. Far from it. These were men pulled from other companies for a variety of reasons, men who had already fought in this interminable battle in this even longer war. But still, they didn’t know what he did. He could see them searching his face for answers. They wouldn’t find any.

“I’m Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby, Commanding Officer of Section E of the 179th Tunnelling Company,” Tommy began, his voice falling easily into the pattern he had made for himself over the last year. “We’ve been tasked with continuing this tunnel, started by Sections C and J of the 180th, as part of a new Somme offensive. This here is Private Owen. Me and him have both been down here before, and he’ll be showing you the ropes.” The men stared at him, pale under the omnipresent trench dirt. “You’ll have heard that clay kickers go mad. I can assure you that we’re no madder than King George. Significantly dirtier, I imagine though.” They softened a bit at that, and one or two of them smiled. “Right, let’s get started.”

These men had been selected because someone thought they would have an aptitude for going underground, but Tommy still chose to do most of the talking in the open air. It wouldn’t do to have panic down below. And it wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be. He felt a little nauseous and his arms were still distractingly achy, but that was to be expected. He could sense the men searching for his panic, and when they didn’t find it, all of them relaxed. 

As the moment neared for them to actually go underground, Tommy felt the tension in his body continue to increase. He feared being afraid down there more than he feared the tunnel itself. He could admit that much. But everything was going fine; he was detached, competent. The men listened to him. Already, they began to trust him.

There was no more delaying.

“You, Billingham is it, will man the top of the shaft for now. You’ll be down soon enough. I’ll go down first, and the rest of you follow me,” Tommy said, finishing off his briefing. The men parted around him and he stepped up to the shaft to secure himself into the harness. His hands were steady as they performed the familiar work, and maybe that lulled him into a false sense of security. Or maybe Tommy just hadn’t managed to completely kill his optimism yet.

Either way, Tommy was completely unprepared for the sheer animal terror that overcame him as he began to lower himself underground.  
Tommy’s heart stopped beating, and when it restarted, the rhythm was erratic. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the yawning blackness, rising up to meet him, sucking him down and down and down. He couldn’t breathe. There was dirt in his mouth, dirt in his eyes. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t—

“Ready, sir?” Came Danny’s voice from far above him, and Tommy realised that he had already hit the tunnel floor. His raw fingers protested violently as he undid the straps. In the lantern light, he could see that his hands were shaking, but his voice was miraculously steady.

“On its way up!” Tommy called out, sending the contraption back. He allowed himself just a moment to lean against the tunnel wall and breathe, willing down the nausea. He wasn’t  
trapped. He had gotten out. He wasn’t trapped. This was just work, just what he was here to do. The men were relying on him. If they saw fear, then it was all over.

By the time the next man’s pockmarked face came into view, Tommy was sorting out his tools. The man opened his mouth in greeting and Tommy put a finger over his lips. Quiet.

The men did well for their first trip down. 

There was an expected amount of tool dropping and unmuffled swearing, but that was why they wouldn’t venture all the way out quite yet. It took a few hours to adjust, and there was no point in making them easy prey for The Boche. In a way, it was good to be back. Tommy didn’t do any of the work himself, his arms still far too weak, but that was a positive as well. His men needed to see him as a commander first. He sent Danny out to report on what they were working with at the far end of the tunnel and got the other men working where they were.

Soon, Tommy’s brief panic was almost completely forgotten. He had always been good at getting on with things. His worry that being buried alive would change that had been obviously been unfounded. 

And then there was an explosion.

Or rather, there was an echo of an explosion far away. The timber in their part of the tunnel shook slightly. Tommy saw the man in front of him flinch and the rumble started and—

Danny was pelting down the tunnel, his face a mask of abject fear. Tommy’s mouth was full of dirt, except that didn’t make sense because he was standing up. The tunnel hadn’t collapsed. The other men were staring at Danny, only a few feet away, pale as an apparition. Tommy’s stomach dropped but before he could consider what had just happened, he was even with Danny, holding his shoulders, talking quietly into his ear.

“Nothing happened. Nothing happened. We can still breathe. See? Just breathe. And look at that light. It’s a lantern, yeah? Nice and bright. Hear the canaries chirping? We’re not there. We got out…” On and on until Danny relaxed in his grip.

“Oh God, sir, I’m sorry. I couldn’t—one moment I was fine and then I was back. Did you feel it?” Danny mumbled, too quiet for anyone else to hear, though Tommy could feel their eyes on the back of his neck.

“It was just an echo. You have to hold it together. You hear me, Private?” Danny nodded, visibly regaining control over himself, but the words felt like ash in Tommy’s mouth. Because he hadn’t held it together either, had he? There had been time, there, between the explosion and Danny’s arrival, time of which Tommy had absolutely no memory. Had he frozen? Screamed? And he had thought there was dirt in his mouth when there wasn’t, when that was a memory. An echo. Fuck. 

He didn’t have time to worry about that. 

He turned back to the rest of the men, lantern held high. “Right. I’ve already told you your roles. If the Boche break through, you kill them. If the canary dies, you run back up the tunnel. Anything else, you keep working. This section needs fortifying. So you can stop staring and start doing your fucking jobs.” He kept his voice low, but he might as well have been shouting. They turned away in a hurry. Good. 

Tommy oversaw the men at work for a while longer. Danny himself had his head down, though the back of his neck was flushed. Tommy wanted to say more to him, but he had a feeling the other man wouldn’t thank him for the added attention. The men hardly so much as looked up. Tommy knew he shouldn’t have gotten so angry. Of course they stared at Danny. They couldn’t help it. Tommy swallowed hard against the thickness in his throat. 

While the men continued their work, Tommy moved off to the listening branch of the tunnel. He knew he should train another man to do this work as well, but for now he needed the space. Soon the rest of the men were swallowed by darkness even though he could hear the sounds of their careful fortifications.

Danny would want to lie low for as long as he could. And how long would that be? How long until it happened again? The section needed him. Even more worryingly, would Tommy be able to stop it or would he too…go away? This listening tunnel was even tighter than the one that his company had built. The walls hugged close around him, the air thin. Tommy found himself fixated on his candle, checking the matches in his pocket. There was sweat on his brow. His breathing was too loud. He wouldn’t be able to listen this way. And then the Germans would break through and he wouldn’t have warned them. 

Tommy had to catch himself against the side of the tunnel, suddenly dizzy, and his arm sparked painfully. The candle guttered. He dropped down to his knees, the ceiling low, and shuffled forward with his elbows on the ground. His hands wouldn’t be able to take his weight. 

After a familiar eternity, Tommy made it to the end of the tunnel. When he held up his candle, he found that his predecessor had scratched a short prayer into the wall. 

_O Lord, Comfort Us In Death_

Tommy pulled the candle away. He was shaking again as he unpacked the geophone. His stiff fingers barely closed around the pen, and he found himself delaying the inevitable. Up above, the memory had been blurry and already faint, but here, it was all around him. Like the words the other soldier had scratched into the wall, the marks of it would long outlast him. The earth remembered.  
Strangely, Tommy could breathe again.

He had found a new truth. He knew it as clearly as he knew that he could never tell a soul who was still among the living. The earth was not worth fighting. The earth considered him a friend, one it would soon welcome back to its embrace. The French countryside was just the top layer, and the earth always, always lay underneath. Waiting. Why had he thought that he had ever gotten out? Why did he think it would change anything?

Tommy’s hands had stopped shaking, and the sweat had begun to dry on his brow. It was just him and the earth, and they knew each other well. He pressed the geophone firmly against the wall of the tunnel, and everything faded away except for the cold metal against his ear. He listened intently.

No shovels. Not yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! Thank you so much for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> It's not really a cliffhanger if you know what happens next...right??? The next chapter is almost ready. If you want to yell at me in the meantime, I have finally caved and rejoined [tumblr](https://josiepugblog.tumblr.com). Don't worry, I also think it was a bad idea. But I'd love some company on this hellsite!


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